Even Sir Malevolus knew better than to try that! However, this conflict is likely to delay the participants while the good guys deal with Rib Cage and Softail, even though the six guards are likely to be dead within seconds. So there is only one pair of derro left to make trouble for the next few minutes.
Given we don’t actually know ‘what’ the lord is yet, other than someone with a really creepy shadow (see level-8-77), this could get interesting.When even a certain armoured assassin gets nervous in his presence, something is definitely up.
There may be many reasons for this. But then, most of these are not mutually exclusive, and some may lead to others.
So yes, «funny thing about THAT…» seems to be coming his way.
The question is, when exactly will Perkins or someone else walk in.
His shadow has nothing special. What’s creepy is the shadow of the fiend perched on his shoulder. Cause this guy has a literal shoulder devil*.
(*Might be in fact a shoulder daemon, or a shoulder demon. Maybe even a shoulder demodand or a shoulder div. Regardless, it for sure does not have a good alignment.)
‘Daemon’ used to have a far more neutral, almost mechanistic connotation, often in philosophical treatises where philosophers feared to use ‘God’ for obvious reasons and came up with some other omnipotent power to set up the parameters of their thought experiments — if anything, the capital E in the daemons’ DnD classification is surprising. Today, this can still be seen in IT, for example, where background services (especially in the Unix/Linux world) are called daemons — and are certainly helpful rather than evil.
Conversely, I doubt ‘demons’ were ever anything else than chaotic evil.
“Daemons” were originally a vague category of Greek mythological creature that weren’t necessarily evil. They were later, umm, demonized by Christians, who liked to depict mythological creatures from other religions as evil (and just needed something to call their bad guys, I guess – the original version of the New Testament was in Greek, after all).
The spelling change from “ae” to plain “e” is not particularly remarkable, and is seen in many English words of Greco-Latin origin, being unrelated to the Christianity-induced shift in meaning and happening later. However, some people deliberate use the older “daemon” spelling to indicate that they’re using the older sense of a supernatural being that isn’t necessarily evil but typically operates subtly in the background, for example the Unix usage you cite.
This is by no means universal usage, though. For example, “Maxwell’s demon” (a thermodynamic thought experiment) was originally spelled without the “a”, but still references the older non-evil usage. Conversely, the “daemons” of the Warhammer settings are pretty evil (in a somewhat different way than traditional evil demons, but still even more different from original Greek daemons), but they mostly just use the fancier spelling to sound exotic.
(Sometimes you even see recursive back-to-not-being-evil-but-still-based-more-on-Christian-demons beings, where they’re just people with bat wings and a penchant for dressing in black but no more inherently disposed to cruelty than anyone else. These are usually spelled “demon”, from what I’ve seen.)
D&D’s “daemons” are evil, though, and are very much “like demons but one alignment step away”. Which makes it clear they’re drawing more from the Christian idea of d(a)emons than the classical Greek one. Which makes it silly that they’re using a word from the same origin (??????) to describe essentially the same kind of creature (a creature from a hellish afterlife which doesn’t merely happen to be evil but actively and deliberately champions the cause of Evil), yet still insist that they’re completely different things. Who even notices the difference between Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil?
This is why I just stick to calling them Yugoloths. Unlikely Baatezu and Tanarri, Yugoloth adequately describes an entire genus (family? clade? phylum?) of fiends, all Neutral Evil and all hailing originally from Hades but now headquartered on Gehenna, with no other non-yugoloth daemons you need to distinguish.
Demon/daimon/daemon is the same thing. Translated to english, the original concept would essentially be “spirit”.
Medieval christianity has made of “demon” a negative word, but it was not always so. Indeed, in the 4th century the Saint, Augustine, explicitely uses the word “demon” (in greek) to describe what in modern christianity are reffered to only as angels: “from what they are, demon (i.e. spirits); from what they do, angel (i.e. messengers)”. Over time the word for “spirit” was repurposed to describe the concept negatively, while the word for “messenger” was taken as the sole descriptor for divine agents.
Fun fact: the “trow”, a mythological creature from the Orkney/Shetland islands, is derived from “troll”, and they were generally described as similar to the smaller, “ugly cute” type of trolls, or goblins. Another spelling for this creature is “drow”, which D&D used to name their dark elves for some reason.
The original dark elves / black elves, as they are occasionally mentioned in Scandinavian mythology, are now believed by many scholars to actually be another term for dwarves.
Oh, and it’s also widely believed that in the earliest versions of the myths dwarves weren’t actually smaller than humans, and this attribute was added to make them more comical once people started taking the old myths less seriously. Yet nowadays, the word dwarf actually means small to the point that a “large dwarf” sounds like an oxymoron!
The same is true of giants (from Greek “gigantes”), by the way, which in earlier versions were described as being the same size as humans, but just unnaturally strong for their size. Later artists started visually representing their strength by making them huge.
…Yeah, mythology is messy.
(Incidentally, I’ve always felt that the Orkney Islands sound like they should be where the orcs live. In this case the similarity is a coincidence and they have different etymologies, though.)
Not unlike biblical Goliath, whom if he really existed, was at best a large and strong human warrior, and not the literal giant he’s sometimes portrayed as.
Goliath is explicitly described as being unusually large, although just in the “human with gigantism” rather than “mythical creature” sense. Like, a foot or two taller than average, not multiple floors tall. If fact, canonical Jewish and Christian versions of the bible describe him as being about three meters tall (which is beyond the tallest modern human on record, at 2.72 meters, but still not to blatantly mythical levels), but this is likely to have been a copying error, as an older version of the story found in the Dead Sea Scrolls described him as only about two meters tall (still taller than 99.9% of people, but not even that dramatic: that still means some eight million people today are taller).
However, he would have looked even larger by comparison because David was still a boy at the time. (I can’t find a mention of the exact age.)
Interestingly, the philistines and the other inhabitants of the ‘promised land’ were so large that the twelve spies who scouted out the promised land called them giants. Goliath was big, even for them, and David was small enough that he didn’t fit in Saul’s armor properly.
The fight must have looked like those photos of the shortest man and the tallest man meeting.
Those scouts were pretty heavily implied to be lying or exaggerating out of cowardice (which God smote them for), so most Phillistines would probably have been normal-sized. Besides, weren’t they mainly supposed to be scouting the Canaanites back then? The Phillistines only showed up later.
Keep in mind that average human height goes up as nutrition improves.
David was very unlikely to be short by the standards of the time and place. Actual mid to late teenagers are near or at their full growth, you’re just used to seeing TV teens who are actually unusually short adults because there aren’t special legal limits on their working hours and their voices don’t break on the set.
Saul and David were close enough in stature that Saul thought David could wear his armor. David refused because he recognized that he did not have the training to move properly in it. This is the relation of a real or realistic mythic event, not a comic farce. Everyone is acting with some sort of rationality. If you have seen farcical depictions it is because later artists have exaggerated the contrast.
People tended to be considered adults at a younger age back then, so seeing teenagers on a battlefield probably wasn’t all that unusual. The fact that everyone (both other Israelites and Goliath himself) mocked David for thinking himself a warrior suggests that he was visibly scrawny.
You also have to factor in social status and access to resources: Goliath, as a high-status warrior (and, likely, some manner of royalty or nobility) is going to have a much better diet than David (from a well-known family, but waaaaay far away from the inheritance to the point where he is essentially a day laborer guarding the family’s herds). This is going to feed into* the preexisting height disparity, allowing Goliath to grow to huge size AND bulk up on the extra proteins and calories, while undernourishment leaves David scrawny and possibly stunts his growth. Taking the source material at face value, it is still a huge gap in apparent ability; something akin to an NBA player facing off against a 16-year-old fast food worker. Which, you know, kind of reinforces the rhetorical point being made when David wins the thing.
*Definitely intended
Obviously, orcs come from the Orkneys, fae from the Faeroes, and, what comes from the Shetlands? Shets? (I am fairly certain that Hebrews do not originate in the Hebrides.)
Hence why Dwarves are better referred to as Dvergr or Dwaorrim or something, with “dwarf” being a racial slur applied by human cultures when first meeting them.
So, did the topmost guard emerge from behind the purple curtain? Also, I just realized that Grawlf’s been “making friends” with guards injured or killed during the various attacks on the castle.
Me being stupid: Do we know yet which “Item” Grawlf doesn’t want to return to the Viscount? Supposedly it is something “pretty useful in his work”, but what work is he referring to: Healing? Removing spines? Creating Fungi-zombies?
Riiight, I totally forgot, thank you! So it is the golem-creating powder? But why does he need it? He can already create meatpuppets! Or is he just obsessed with everything that creates “life”, as any good healer would be (no alignement meant).
Grawlf being some sort of misguided Dr. Frankenstein with the noble aim to better the life, or half-life, or pre-afterlife of his contemporaries? Thinking the end is justifying the means? Not very likely, but I love the idea- I still like Dr. Grawlf! A bit…
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Well, well, well.
Lots of worms turning these days.
…
Trying to, anyway. The Marquis has friends in low places.
Those worms will be turning to ashes before long.
Even Sir Malevolus knew better than to try that! However, this conflict is likely to delay the participants while the good guys deal with Rib Cage and Softail, even though the six guards are likely to be dead within seconds. So there is only one pair of derro left to make trouble for the next few minutes.
Six guards are already as dead as Whitey. Not to mention being as green as Dorilys though probably for differing reason.
Their eyes glow green in the last panel, but I don’t think they are otherwise green.
Having green light shed on your face will often make you look green. Depends on complexion.
“Lately” in this context meaning “late” as in deceased? I still don’t know what exactly happened to Whitey…
That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? “Making friends” is quite enough of a play on words, I think.
It would make sense.
Killed and reanimated as a fungal zombie. And not the only one, it seems.
If the guards were ‘late’, then they’re most likely about to be ‘late’, again. ‘Later’? ‘Laterer’? Something.
Green glowing eyes, whats up with that?
Apparently he can do amazing things with fungus!
Given we don’t actually know ‘what’ the lord is yet, other than someone with a really creepy shadow (see level-8-77), this could get interesting.When even a certain armoured assassin gets nervous in his presence, something is definitely up.
There may be many reasons for this. But then, most of these are not mutually exclusive, and some may lead to others.
So yes, «funny thing about THAT…» seems to be coming his way.
The question is, when exactly will Perkins or someone else walk in.
What happens when one of them is ordered to help Presti with her prisoner?
His shadow has nothing special. What’s creepy is the shadow of the fiend perched on his shoulder. Cause this guy has a literal shoulder devil*.
(*Might be in fact a shoulder daemon, or a shoulder demon. Maybe even a shoulder demodand or a shoulder div. Regardless, it for sure does not have a good alignment.)
I’ve always thought it was stupid that D&D treats “demon” and “daemon” as completely different and unrelated creatures.
‘Daemon’ used to have a far more neutral, almost mechanistic connotation, often in philosophical treatises where philosophers feared to use ‘God’ for obvious reasons and came up with some other omnipotent power to set up the parameters of their thought experiments — if anything, the capital E in the daemons’ DnD classification is surprising. Today, this can still be seen in IT, for example, where background services (especially in the Unix/Linux world) are called daemons — and are certainly helpful rather than evil.
Conversely, I doubt ‘demons’ were ever anything else than chaotic evil.
Yes, I know that.
“Daemons” were originally a vague category of Greek mythological creature that weren’t necessarily evil. They were later, umm, demonized by Christians, who liked to depict mythological creatures from other religions as evil (and just needed something to call their bad guys, I guess – the original version of the New Testament was in Greek, after all).
The spelling change from “ae” to plain “e” is not particularly remarkable, and is seen in many English words of Greco-Latin origin, being unrelated to the Christianity-induced shift in meaning and happening later. However, some people deliberate use the older “daemon” spelling to indicate that they’re using the older sense of a supernatural being that isn’t necessarily evil but typically operates subtly in the background, for example the Unix usage you cite.
This is by no means universal usage, though. For example, “Maxwell’s demon” (a thermodynamic thought experiment) was originally spelled without the “a”, but still references the older non-evil usage. Conversely, the “daemons” of the Warhammer settings are pretty evil (in a somewhat different way than traditional evil demons, but still even more different from original Greek daemons), but they mostly just use the fancier spelling to sound exotic.
(Sometimes you even see recursive back-to-not-being-evil-but-still-based-more-on-Christian-demons beings, where they’re just people with bat wings and a penchant for dressing in black but no more inherently disposed to cruelty than anyone else. These are usually spelled “demon”, from what I’ve seen.)
D&D’s “daemons” are evil, though, and are very much “like demons but one alignment step away”. Which makes it clear they’re drawing more from the Christian idea of d(a)emons than the classical Greek one. Which makes it silly that they’re using a word from the same origin (??????) to describe essentially the same kind of creature (a creature from a hellish afterlife which doesn’t merely happen to be evil but actively and deliberately champions the cause of Evil), yet still insist that they’re completely different things. Who even notices the difference between Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil?
Huh, the site claims to be UTF-8 but the forum won’t accept Greek characters?
Oh well, you can find the original Greek spelling (which was also used for the Christian version) on Wikipedia.
Note that the most accurate transliteration is actually “daimon” – the tendency to respell “ai” as “ae” is a Latin innovation.
This is why I just stick to calling them Yugoloths. Unlikely Baatezu and Tanarri, Yugoloth adequately describes an entire genus (family? clade? phylum?) of fiends, all Neutral Evil and all hailing originally from Hades but now headquartered on Gehenna, with no other non-yugoloth daemons you need to distinguish.
You forget the Gehreleth, then, the other type of daemon…
Thanks, someone who knows there stuff!
Demon/daimon/daemon is the same thing. Translated to english, the original concept would essentially be “spirit”.
Medieval christianity has made of “demon” a negative word, but it was not always so. Indeed, in the 4th century the Saint, Augustine, explicitely uses the word “demon” (in greek) to describe what in modern christianity are reffered to only as angels: “from what they are, demon (i.e. spirits); from what they do, angel (i.e. messengers)”. Over time the word for “spirit” was repurposed to describe the concept negatively, while the word for “messenger” was taken as the sole descriptor for divine agents.
It is an inherent problem of having to define your monsters.
In actual Scandavanian folklore “troll” covers just about any magical creature, including, sometimes, human beings who practice magic.
Fun fact: the “trow”, a mythological creature from the Orkney/Shetland islands, is derived from “troll”, and they were generally described as similar to the smaller, “ugly cute” type of trolls, or goblins. Another spelling for this creature is “drow”, which D&D used to name their dark elves for some reason.
The original dark elves / black elves, as they are occasionally mentioned in Scandinavian mythology, are now believed by many scholars to actually be another term for dwarves.
Oh, and it’s also widely believed that in the earliest versions of the myths dwarves weren’t actually smaller than humans, and this attribute was added to make them more comical once people started taking the old myths less seriously. Yet nowadays, the word dwarf actually means small to the point that a “large dwarf” sounds like an oxymoron!
The same is true of giants (from Greek “gigantes”), by the way, which in earlier versions were described as being the same size as humans, but just unnaturally strong for their size. Later artists started visually representing their strength by making them huge.
…Yeah, mythology is messy.
(Incidentally, I’ve always felt that the Orkney Islands sound like they should be where the orcs live. In this case the similarity is a coincidence and they have different etymologies, though.)
Not unlike biblical Goliath, whom if he really existed, was at best a large and strong human warrior, and not the literal giant he’s sometimes portrayed as.
Goliath is explicitly described as being unusually large, although just in the “human with gigantism” rather than “mythical creature” sense. Like, a foot or two taller than average, not multiple floors tall. If fact, canonical Jewish and Christian versions of the bible describe him as being about three meters tall (which is beyond the tallest modern human on record, at 2.72 meters, but still not to blatantly mythical levels), but this is likely to have been a copying error, as an older version of the story found in the Dead Sea Scrolls described him as only about two meters tall (still taller than 99.9% of people, but not even that dramatic: that still means some eight million people today are taller).
However, he would have looked even larger by comparison because David was still a boy at the time. (I can’t find a mention of the exact age.)
Especially given that they didn’t have good measuring sticks in those days.
And it’s hard to measure someone who’s trying to kill you.
By the time they could plausibly have tried measuring him, he was one head shorter…
Interestingly, the philistines and the other inhabitants of the ‘promised land’ were so large that the twelve spies who scouted out the promised land called them giants. Goliath was big, even for them, and David was small enough that he didn’t fit in Saul’s armor properly.
The fight must have looked like those photos of the shortest man and the tallest man meeting.
Those scouts were pretty heavily implied to be lying or exaggerating out of cowardice (which God smote them for), so most Phillistines would probably have been normal-sized. Besides, weren’t they mainly supposed to be scouting the Canaanites back then? The Phillistines only showed up later.
Keep in mind that average human height goes up as nutrition improves.
David was very unlikely to be short by the standards of the time and place. Actual mid to late teenagers are near or at their full growth, you’re just used to seeing TV teens who are actually unusually short adults because there aren’t special legal limits on their working hours and their voices don’t break on the set.
Saul and David were close enough in stature that Saul thought David could wear his armor. David refused because he recognized that he did not have the training to move properly in it. This is the relation of a real or realistic mythic event, not a comic farce. Everyone is acting with some sort of rationality. If you have seen farcical depictions it is because later artists have exaggerated the contrast.
Do we know for a fact that he was a teenager?
People tended to be considered adults at a younger age back then, so seeing teenagers on a battlefield probably wasn’t all that unusual. The fact that everyone (both other Israelites and Goliath himself) mocked David for thinking himself a warrior suggests that he was visibly scrawny.
You also have to factor in social status and access to resources: Goliath, as a high-status warrior (and, likely, some manner of royalty or nobility) is going to have a much better diet than David (from a well-known family, but waaaaay far away from the inheritance to the point where he is essentially a day laborer guarding the family’s herds). This is going to feed into* the preexisting height disparity, allowing Goliath to grow to huge size AND bulk up on the extra proteins and calories, while undernourishment leaves David scrawny and possibly stunts his growth. Taking the source material at face value, it is still a huge gap in apparent ability; something akin to an NBA player facing off against a 16-year-old fast food worker. Which, you know, kind of reinforces the rhetorical point being made when David wins the thing.
*Definitely intended
Obviously, orcs come from the Orkneys, fae from the Faeroes, and, what comes from the Shetlands? Shets? (I am fairly certain that Hebrews do not originate in the Hebrides.)
The Shetlands are the home of she-ettins.
Hence why Dwarves are better referred to as Dvergr or Dwaorrim or something, with “dwarf” being a racial slur applied by human cultures when first meeting them.
Or a shoulder h1.
Come to think of it, he’s grinning like … Grinner.
Eh, grinner’s smile is way less off.
…And I don’t think it’s the Marquis.
Oh Grawlf, that fungus must be getting to your head if you think the viscount is alone.
“Well, this certainly a minor inconvenience.”
It took me way too long to realize how the Viscount looks like he has a curly tail and cloven hooves if you squint just right.
That is some amazing character design.
So, did the topmost guard emerge from behind the purple curtain? Also, I just realized that Grawlf’s been “making friends” with guards injured or killed during the various attacks on the castle.
He hid cunningly behind the speech balloon!
Uh oh, these guys seem to be high on fungi.
I’m going to go out on (what I see as a very short) limb and say that is going to be his last mistake.
Dr. Grawlf’s been sharing the party flavors and now all the guards are fun guys and fun gals!
I’ll see myself out…
Me being stupid: Do we know yet which “Item” Grawlf doesn’t want to return to the Viscount? Supposedly it is something “pretty useful in his work”, but what work is he referring to: Healing? Removing spines? Creating Fungi-zombies?
The bag the derro gave him, the one that was short some of the mateiral
Riiight, I totally forgot, thank you! So it is the golem-creating powder? But why does he need it? He can already create meatpuppets! Or is he just obsessed with everything that creates “life”, as any good healer would be (no alignement meant).
Grawlf being some sort of misguided Dr. Frankenstein with the noble aim to better the life, or half-life, or pre-afterlife of his contemporaries? Thinking the end is justifying the means? Not very likely, but I love the idea- I still like Dr. Grawlf! A bit…
This has been a rather pointed conversation.